Brian Min studies the political economy of development with an emphasis on distributive politics, public goods provision, and energy politics.

His book, Power and the Vote: Elections and Electricity in the Developing World, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2015. The book shows how the provision of seemingly universal public goods are intricately shaped by electoral priorities. In so doing, it introduces new methods using high-resolution satellite imagery to study the distribution of electricity across and within the developing world.

His earlier research
on ethnic politics and conflict introduced a major
new dataset (with Lars-Erik Cederman and Andreas Wimmer) on Ethnic Power Relations
(EPR) in all countries of the world since 1946.

He is the recipient of the 2011 Gabriel Almond Award from the American Political Science Association for best dissertation in comparative politics. His research has been funded by the World Bank, International Growth Centre, and the National Science Foundation. He has conducted fieldwork in India, Senegal, Mali, Vietnam, and the Canadian Arctic.